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Its very popular to use a RESTful approach of sending blobs of XML over HTTP or JMS. Using the full SOAP protocol and WS-* is often an unnecessary overhead.

ActiveSOAP now supports both pure REST and one or more SOAP protocols concurrently on the same service endpoint over HTTP and/or JMS (or other transports).

This allows lightweight some clients to use pure REST and then when the use of the SOAP protocol (and other optional WS-protocols) makes sense, to support those too all in the same endpoint.

This is useful as you should only pay for what you need; for many use cases pure REST is fine - its often up to the endpoint to decide whether or not the SOAP protocol is worth the cost and if it is which version of SOAP it wishes to support along with what of the WS-protocols it requires too.